Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
with how to search the catalog, there may be new features of which you are unaware. Next, enter
a broad topic into the search field
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such as “biological anthropology” or “human skeletons.”
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Your search will pull up topics the library owns that cover these topics. Find out where they
are physically located in the stacks. Go to that section of the library and look around. This section
will probably have all the topics relevant to biological anthropology. (The journals and theses/
dissertations may be located in different sections of the library.) You will see that the topics in this
section are organized thematically
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so the topics on human evolution will be grouped together
as will the topics on skeletal biology. For a variety of reasons, often your computer search of the
catalog will not necessarily return all the relevant results. Whenever you go to the stacks to
retrieve a topic you searched for, take a look at the topics adjacent to it. These topics will be
related to your topic in some way, and might also hold pertinent information that you need.
Sometimes the library does not own a topic or journal that you require. In these cases, you will
need to use interlibrary loan. This service is usually free for students and faculty. There should be
a link somewhere on the library's website to request a loan. Fill out the required information and
usually within about a week or so, depending on the physical location and/or rarity of the
resource, it will arrive at the library for you (or it may be delivered to you electronically). Interli-
brary loan can take some time, which is one reason not towait until the last minute to do your liter-
ature review. The reference you need the most is frequently the reference not available at the very
moment you need it. In addition, sometimes the library will own the topic you need but someone
else has checked it out. In that case, you can request a recall of the topic. However, keep inmind that
this process can take even longer, as the person who has it may not bring it back right away.
In addition to the catalog, the library will own rights to access a number of different data-
bases and indexes, many of which have full text articles available for download. You can also
search these from the library's website
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look for the link for “databases.” Typically you will
be able to search for relevant databases either by the name of the subject (i.e., “anthro-
pology”) or by the name or type of the database. Most libraries have also purchased licenses
to different journals. This then allows you to click on the name of a journal within the catalog
and it will bring you to the link where downloading full text articles can be done.
One database with which you will become the most familiar is Thomson Reuters Web of
Knowledge
SM
, which contains the database Web of Science
. This database holds full text arti-
cles in many of the journals with content in skeletal biology. You will come to love this database.
Most likely your college or university owns a license to access it. For the social sciences, it has
content back to 1956, and for the natural sciences, back to 1900. One of the best features of
Web of Science is its “cited reference search.” This allows you to find other articles that have cited
a particular article. For example, if you are interested in article X, first search for it and then click
on “cited reference search.” This will bring up every article in the database that has cited article
X. You can also go about this backwards, by looking at the references cited by article X as well.
This enables you to be a detective, and expedites some of the literature review work.
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Note that there are certain conventions to use when searching, known as Boolean operators (e.g., AND;
NOT; OR). Each database or library catalog will have a tutorial on these and other conventions. Learning
what they are and how to use them will improve your search.
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Keep in mind that databases may or may not have information on topic chapters and other sources of
which you will need to be aware. While the cited reference search feature will show which articles have
cited article X, it will not show which topic chapters have.
